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The right messaging is crucial to business success in today’s fast-evolving digital landscape. Modern-day customers expect businesses to engage with them with the right message at the right time on their preferred platform. Businesses that successfully meet these expectations experience higher retention and customer loyalty. Various studies confirm this trend too.
- A research study by Podium shows that 90% of customers prefer interacting with a brand.
- Another report from OneSignal confirms that brands using notifications for intelligent delivery of messages in preferred time zones and channels experienced a 28% boost in engagement compared to those that don't.
This guide provides a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to build a customer notification system without any coding.
Why Customer Notification Systems Matter: The Hidden Story
Most companies make the mistake of creating a notification system from scratch, only to realize later the futility of their entire endeavor. Here is a reality check if you are looking to build a notification system:
- It’s more than a one-and-done task: Developing a notification system is just the beginning. You can't simply trigger notifications and forget; you must ensure the right messages reach the right people at the right time.
- Maintenance can feel like a marathon: Notifications aren’t just a matter of pressing the send button. It requires continuous optimization.
- The Troubleshooting Challenges: Glitches are an unavoidable reality in the world of technology. You should be able to identify and troubleshoot the bugs as and when they appear.
- The ‘Unsubscribe’ Conundrum: It’s a tricky aspect. If users continue to find your messages irrelevant, they won’t hesitate a second to hit the unsubscribe button. Therefore, the challenge is to build a system that does not let them go off the hook.
Simply put, developing a notification engine is just the starting point; the real challenge lies in sustaining it to the point where it captures user interest.
That’s the hidden story behind notifications.
Notification System: Critical Features
A customer notification system simplifies the process of sending, tracking, and handling notifications through SMS and Email channels, empowering product engineering teams to design, build, and implement a feature-rich notification system.
Some of the prominent features of a customer notification system include:
- Multi-Channel Support: It’s the backbone of any customer notification system. A robust system allows you to reach customers through various channels, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and in-app messages.
- Integration: It enables hassle-free and fast integration of the notification system into your app or website and other third-party software.
- Message Templates: Since every messaging channel has unique content requirements, the notification software system should offer a wide range of templates for consistent and branded notifications.
- Trigger-Based Notifications: Implement notifications based on specific user actions, such as order confirmation, OTP validation or other account-related activities.
- Multiple Use Cases: A customer notification system should cater to specific use cases, including reminders, alerts, feedback, two-way notification, authentication, support, and marketing.
- Segmentation: Segment your customer base according to your marketing campaign requirements to reach targeted customers and increase messaging relevance.
- Message Personalization: It allows you to create and send personalized communication notifications with user-specific information, enhancing customer engagement.
- Customization: It allows you to customize almost everything - the content, templates, features, layout, timing, and notification triggers.
- Automation: This feature enables you to set up automated communication workflows for various use cases and scenarios, such as sending order confirmations or password reset emails.
- Message Scheduling: Schedule notifications for specific events, dates, and times to deliver timely messages.
- Real-Time Updates: Send near-real-time notifications, such as SMS, Emails, WhatsApp, or Push notifications, for highly time-sensitive events and emergencies.
- Analytics and Reporting: Track key performance metrics with comprehensive analytics and reporting features.
- Security and Compliance: Since customer notifications deal with sensitive user data, they should protect sensitive customer data and ensure compliance with global and local data protection regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA.
- Scalability: A notification system should be able to handle varying load levels with an increasing customer base and business growth. It should be able to send messages without causing delays or overloading the system.
Customer Notification System: Challenges Galore
Though customer notifications have a proven track record of boosting engagements, customers have diverse preferences for communication channels. Email, WhatsApp, web notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, and cross-platform mobile push notifications have set standard user expectations. Some savvy customers even prefer to receive notifications on Slack.
This is where the need to conduct a reality check arises:
- Keeping customers engaged through all touchpoints is a monumental task, especially if it is not your engineering team’s core competency.
- Developing a full-stack customer notification system from scratch may pose a formidable challenge for the product team. It involves navigating complex issues like scalability, workflow automation,and many more tasks. These complexities often translate into time-consuming implementation and integration processes.
- As the notification management system grows in complexity with the expansion of the user base, maintenance and upgrade costs increase significantly.
The Fyno Advantage
Fyno is a developer-first notification infrastructure platform that has been designed considering the issues the development teams face. It offers distinct advantages.
- Seamless Setup: With just one line of code, Fyno simplifies the setup process and allows you to initiate your notification system smoothly and without hassle.
- Intuitive Smart Routing: Our robust routing system makes achieving harmony across multiple channels a breeze. You can effortlessly design and execute intricate cross-channel notification flows, even for the most complex scenarios.
- Effortless Scaling with Automation: Elevate your scalability game effortlessly with our powerful automation. It eliminates the complexity of coding, simplifying the process of connecting various systems and workflows seamlessly.
- Centralized Template Management: Maintain consistency in your messaging by managing and customizing templates for diverse notification events in one centralized location. This will ensure a unified and impactful brand message.
- Real-Time Insights for Proactive Growth: Embrace the dynamic world of real-time data to monitor notification volumes, performance, and engagement across multiple channels and providers. Gain a competitive edge by staying ahead of the curve.
- Streamlined Notification Management: Simplify your workflow with Fyno’s unified interface, designed for effortless creation, previewing, and dispatching of notifications. Navigate through the entire process with remarkable ease.
- Enhance Customer Retention: Engage proactively with customers by leveraging automation and personalized notifications. Offer tailor-made incentives, product recommendations, and timely updates to elevate the user experience, keep the customers in the loop and foster loyalty.
Building a Notification System with Fyno
With Fyno, even your junior-most developer can build and integrate a world-class customer notification system within a few minutes. It offers a silver lining for product companies that are looking for a robust, feature-rich notification engine without burdening their engineering teams.
Getting started
So you’re ready for this journey!
➡️ The first thing you’ll need to do is set up a Fyno account. Send a Request Access by entering your email ID to schedule a demo.
➡️ Enter your User ID and Password to access the main dashboard.
Integration
➡️ First, it’ll be helpful to begin by collecting your API credentials or authentication keys from your current communication providers or platforms.
➡️ Click View Integrations, as shown in the screenshot above.
➡️ Next, choose your provider, enter the credentials, and add the specified channel or provider you need. If your provider isn't listed, Fyno can add them within 5 days.
This process is super easy and can be completed within 5 minutes.
If you’re looking for more information, refer to Fyno’s documentation.
Additionally, you can refer to the following documentation for channel integration:
- Messaging (SMS)
- Chat (Slack and Teams)
- Push Notification
Customize Templates
It’s a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) template editor. Fyno allows developers to create and store templates for all your message content. You can also customize them to fit different situations or people without coding with just drag and drop.
These templates are organized by the type of channel you use for communication.
It's a critical part of building a notification system, and Fyno makes this process a breeze.
To know more about templates, refer to the document.
Routing to Build Smart Flow
This, again, is a tricky part for developers. But Fyno allows you to build a smart communication flow with a few clicks, drags and drops. It offers the flexibility and freedom of building a notification system.
To know more, click here.
Analytics & Logs
Fyno allows to track, measure and compare channel performance, track delivery and open rates for each notification event, channel and provider. Additionally, you can view comprehensive logs detailing complete message routes.
It provides the analytics and log details for the following:
- Events
- Channels
- Integrations
- Providers
- Routing
To know in detail, click on analytics & logs.
Building an Enterprise-Ready Customer Notification System
Fyno provides you with a set of simple APIs and a dashboard for developers to design, build, and integrate a robust notification system without having to depend on engineering teams.
Don’t just take our word for it. Why not see Fyno in action for yourself?
Try it out and take the first big leap in building a powerful notification system.
